A Republican Primary With No Real Competition →

Rather, the main story of the Republican primary season has been that the race has been extraordinarily uncompetitive. Despite the absence of a Republican incumbent or even sitting vice president, the sense among many in the Party that President Obama is very vulnerable and a base energized by the Republican victories in the 2010 midterm election, Mitt Romney has been the front runner for the nomination almost since the day John McCain lost in 2008. With two weeks to go before the first votes are cast, he still occupies that position.

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Romney and the Decline of the Tea Party →

With Mitch Daniels confirming that he will not run for president, and new polls showing that Mitt Romney is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012, there is a real possibility that the 2012 primary will be over before it really starts. There is a small possibility that one of the candidates like Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich will galvanize the far right and make a race of it, and an even smaller possibility that a new candidate like Chris Christie will make a late entrance into the race and win the nomination, but with about eight months before the first vote is cast, Romney is increasingly likely to be the nominee.

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Romney's Work Beginning to Pay Off →

Romney has done his work relatively quietly while the decisions by Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee not to run and the disastrous beginning to Newt Gingrich's quixotic bid for the White House have received considerably more coverage in recent weeks. Of these three stories, Huckabee's decision not to run is the most significant. Huckabee is a good politician with excellent communication skills and opinions that would have resonated well with the conservative Republican base. Huckabee also had a very difficult time building an organization and raising money in 2008 and evinced little enthusiasm for doing that again in 2012, seemingly preferring the comfort and compensation of his work for Fox News.

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Republicans Aren't Falling in Line in 2012 →

The Republican nomination, on the other hand, for the first time in many years, has neither a clear frontrunner, nor somebody who can legitimately lay claim to having paid their dues and waited their turn as, for example, was the case with John McCain in 2008, Bob Dole in 1996 or George H.W. Bush in 1988. The candidate who comes closest to meeting this description is Mitt Romney who finished second to McCain in 2008, but has not been a mainstay of Republican politics for very long and was an unknown outside of his home state a mere five years ago. Haley Barbour and Newt Gingrich, unlike Romney, have been prominent national Republicans for years, but have failed to mobilize sufficient support to plausibly present themselves as frontrunners.

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Lincoln Mitchell